10 Key Decisions to Shape Your Corporate Incubator
Most corporate incubators are built before anyone decides what they are for. Ten decisions settle whether yours produces ventures or overhead. This report works through each one, with real incubators to compare yours against.
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47 pages · PDF and onlineWhat you walk away with
- A clear purpose for your incubator, and the range it will cover
- The selection criteria, timeline and incentives that keep it producing
- A plan for what happens to ventures after they leave
Drawn from venture work with
Why this report exists
An incubator is easy to launch and hard to justify.
Corporates open incubators to fuel innovation and win new markets, then find the hard part is everything after the launch: what qualifies as a venture, who decides, and where a graduate is supposed to go.
The building is not the decision. The ten around it are.
What changes
Ten decisions, in the order you have to make them.
Each one closes off a way an incubator quietly fails, from a purpose nobody shares to ventures with nowhere to graduate to.
Set it up
Know what your incubator is for and who runs it
- 1Establish a clear purposeWhat the incubator exists to produce
- 2Define the rangeHow far from the core it is allowed to go
- 3Build the teamWho runs it, and where they come from
Fill it
Have a pipeline and a way to choose from it
- 4Identify opportunitiesWhere new growth is going to come from
- 5Set selection criteriaWhat makes an idea worth incubating
- 6Set timeline and milestonesWhat the programme looks like week to week
Run it and land it
Keep it resourced, motivated and pointed somewhere
- 7Allocate resourcesWhat each venture gets, and for how long
- 8Get the incentives rightWhat the team is actually working for
- 9Position it internallyWhere the incubator sits in the structure
- 10Plan past incubationWhere a venture goes once it graduates
Inside the report
Built to decide with, not just read.
10Decisions, in sequence
6Benefits set out up front
10Incubators worth copying
1Worked example, Daimler's Lab1886
Pages from the report
“Today's corporations are increasingly relying on incubators to fuel innovation and expand their market shares.”
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